Narratives have great power, but their power increases dramatically when building on other narratives.

What does that mean in practice? It means that we need to be thoughtful and deliberately make choices about where we choose to pursue our narratives. Context and location are critical to enhancing the power of narrative.

I’ve made a distinction between stories and narrativeshere and here. Briefly, I’ve suggested that stories are self-contained (they have a beginning, middle and resolution) and they're about the story teller or some other people, they're not about the listener. In contrast, narratives are open-ended, they are yet to be resolved and their resolution depends upon the choices and actions of the listener. As a result, they're a powerful call to action, emphasizing the agency that we all have to make a difference.

I’ve also suggested that narratives exist at three distinct levels – personal, institutional and social. Most recently, I’ve been exploring the power of personal narrative here and here.

Start with your personal narrative

Now, let's pull back and explore how these three levels of narratives can be connected to achieve even more impact.We need to start by reflecting on and refining our own narrative. Few of us have taken the trouble to articulate our personal narrative, much less reflect on it.

Yet, if we look back on the major choices and actions in our lives, there is an implicit narrative, even if we weren'tt aware of it at the time. We owe it to ourselves to draw out that narrative and reflect on its usefulness in helping us to have the kind of impact we want in the world.

Many of our narratives are limiting or even self-destructive. We have an opportunity to achieve much more of our potential if we evolve more effective narratives that tap into what we are really trying to achieve and that more productively engage others in helping us to achieve greater impact. It doesn’t matter where we are; if our narrative is limiting, we won’t be able to take full advantage of the resources that our environment provides.

But, if we are pursuing a more effective narrative, then location and context can make a big difference. Remember, narratives are ultimately a call to action for the people around us. If the people around us are pursuing very different, and perhaps even contradictory narratives, we’ll be much less effective than if we can connect with people who are pursuing complementary narratives. Yes, I know, digital networks can help to connect us, wherever we’re located, but I continue to believe that face to face relationships in physical space are ultimately the most powerful form of connections.

So, what should we do? Well, once we’ve reflected on our existing narrative and determined what personal narrative would have the greatest ability to achieve more of our potential, perhaps we should start reflecting on relevant institutional and social narratives. I mean, start taking a hard look at the narratives of the institutions and societies where you are currently spending your time. Are they consistent with the personal narrative you're seeking to pursue? Do they offer the potential to amplify the impact of your personal narrative? Or, do they undermine and subvert the personal narrative you're pursuing?

Explore relevant social narratives

The best place to start is with relevant social narratives. What city or region do you live in? What's the narrative of that city or region? How does it map to your personal narrative? If it’s not consistent with your narrative, perhaps you might consider moving to a city or region that more closely maps to your narrative. Then you’ll be more likely to find and connect with people who can support and amplify your personal narrative. If the narrative of the city or region you live in is hostile to, or incompatible with, your personal narrative, you’ll find yourself constantly swimming upstream and drained by the effort, rather than energized.

And, by the way, if you don’t live in a city, perhaps you should consider moving to a city with a compatible narrative. As I’ve indicated elsewhere, cities can be a powerful accelerator of learning, especially if the city has a narrative that's consistent with your personal narrative. Unless your personal narrative requires you to live in a rural area, you’re much more likely to be successful in pursuing your personal narrative if you live in a city.

Take a hard look at relevant institutional narratives

Once you’ve resolved that, the next question is what institution are you most closely affiliated with? If you’re working as part of a larger group, does the company or group you work with have an institutional narrative that supports and amplifies your narrative? If not, you’re likely to encounter the same issues I mentioned earlier with urban or regional narratives. You’ll be far more successful in pursuing your personal narrative if you're located in a city/region and organization that supports your personal narrative.

I know we don’t always have the luxury of being able to make choices on these two fronts, but I’ve become convinced that we'd be well advised to make sacrifices when possible to get better alignment between our personal narratives and the urban/regional and institutional narratives around us. At a minimum, we should explore the potential to join together with others in the relevant institutions to evolve the insititutional narrative in a direction that's more compatible with our personal narrative.

My journey to Silicon Valley

How does this work in practice? Let me share a bit of my personal journey. I’ve discussed the evolution of my personal narrative here and here. As I’ve indicated, my personal narrative has evolved to something like: “let’s overcome our fear and feel the excitement that comes from exploring new frontiers on the edge together so that we can provide others with platforms to achieve more of their potential.”

I grew up outside the U.S., living in a different country virtually every year, so I had no strong roots anywhere. I went to college in the northeastern part of the US and England, two areas that are not particularly known as edgy. But, during a summer in college, I had the good fortune to spend a summer in the San Francisco Bay area. I fell in love with the area immediately. I knew this was the area where I was meant to live.

It took me about 15 years to finally make the move to this area but, once I did, there was no looking back. Even though I had not yet started the process of articulating and evolving my narrative, I instinctively knew that this was an area full of edge frontiers to be explored. I was deeply moved by how friendly people were out here and how willing they were to connect and support each other in exploring frontiers together.

I moved to the San Francisco Bay area with a couple of friends to do a start-up in the computer industry. At the time, I knew nothing about computers but I learned quickly by diving into the deep end of the pool. It was an intense and deep immersion into an exciting frontier. The more I learned, the more I became convinced that this technology was an extraordinary platform to help all of us achieve more of our potential.

It was my first exposure to Silicon Valley, a region that has grown and evolved over decades, driven by acompelling narrative: “for the first time, we are in possession of a set of exponential technologies that have the potential to change the world but it won’t happen on its own. Will you join us so that we can explore this digital frontier and change the world together?” It has drawn people from all over the world who share a commitment to changing the world through technology innovation. It drew me and has held me captive for almost 35 years.

I couldn’t imagine a more perfect alignment with my evolving personal narrative. Over the years, I’ve met a dazzling array of people who, in one form or another, have joined me in exploring some very exciting frontiers on the edge of strategy and technology.

My journey through institutions

Over this exciting time in Silicon Valley, I've participated in many institutions, including start-ups, senior executive positions in tech companies and leading consulting firms. Although it wasn’t explicit at the time, I've moved from one institution to another when I felt there would be an opportunity to have more impact on the edge frontiers that I was exploring. In each case, an institution with a complementary narrative provided me with far more leverage than I ever could have achieved on my own. When our narratives started to diverge, I knew it was time to move on.

For an extended period of time, I was on my own, pursuing strategy consulting and business research as a free agent. It was a wonderful and very rewarding time, but I missed the leverage that I achieved when I was able to participate in an institution that had a complementary narrative.

When I was approached by Deloitte eight years ago to set up an independent research center that came to be known as the Center for the Edge, I saw an opportunity to build an institution with a narrative that would reinforce and leverage my personal narrative. I’ve been able to gather a team of extraordinary people who have deeply bought in to our institutional narrative and who work together every day to achieve the opportunity that we see by engaging others in our journey.

One could say that I’ve been very lucky - serendipity has certainly played an important role in my life. But, on reflection, I would say that ny effort to make my own narrative explicit and then to evolve it in a more promising direction also played a significant role. And, even more importantly, I’ve sought and found alignment between my personal narrative and relevant institutional and social narratives.

In my last posting, I shared the evolution of my personal narrative to illustrate how personal narratives can both confine and expand our horizons.

A number of you reached out to me and questioned whether I was really talking about a narrative or simply a belief about how others could support me in achieving impact. Once again, as in my early discussion of corporate narratives, I’m guilty of abbreviation in a way that can mislead.

Let me unpack my early personal narrative statement into something that maps more clearly to a narrative structure while still leaving it open-ended and ultimately calling the listener to action (for the distinction between a story and narrative, see my early post here).

As you may recall, I framed my early personal narrative as follows: “I’m here to help you with my mind.” Now, as presented, it doesn’t sound much like a narrative. But let’s dive into this in more detail and flesh out the narrative lurking underneath that statement.

The deeper narrative

It all began in my early childhood when my first memories were of my mother’s tirades of anger. She said many things in anger, but the ones that stood out most in my memory were: “You’re such a burden - I wish you had never been born” and “You have no consideration of me – all you care about is yourself.”

As you might imagine, those words were deeply painful. My only escape was to retreat into my room and try to block out her yelling by immersing myself in a book that would take me to a distant place, leaving my emotions behind and seeking refuge in the world of the mind and imagination.

My father was often away. Even when he was there, he was a mild-mannered man and would go into his study, avoiding my mother’s wrath. The message to me was clear: I was abandoned by both of my parents.

After each tirade, I would resolve to be better. I tried as hard as I could to be a good boy and to be more attentive to my mother’s needs. But nothing seemed to work. Her rage would be triggered by small, unexpected things, things that I couldn't anticipate or control. When I first heard the term “walking on eggshells”, I knew immediately what it meant.

The only thing that seemed to win praise from my mother was my academic accomplishment. Both my mother and father were the first in their family to go to college (not to mention graduate school) and they both respected academic achievement.

So, as I grew older, I channeled a lot of effort into accumulating good grades and degrees. I began to write, both because that also won praise from my parents and because it was a way for me to express myself without having to engage in face to face interactions with people (because, God knows, I would possibly trigger rage from others).

When I was in fourth grade, I took an aptitude test and the results came back saying that I should either be a priest or a social worker. At the time, I dismissed these results, since I had no particular religious inclination or desire to work with the emotionally troubled or the poor. But, as I look back, I now realize that the aptitude test might have been far more insightful than I thought at the time.

I ended up spending most of my career as a management consultant. While one might not immediately associate management consultants with priests or social workers, they do share one thing in common. They’re all driven by a desire to help people. They’re all focused on the needs of others, rather than one’s own needs. As a management consultant, you’re taught from the first day that the client’s needs come first, that everything else is secondary. Your goal is to understand their needs and then do whatever you can to address their needs.

The key lesson that I took from my childhood was that my needs did not matter. It was all about seeing and serving the needs of others. If I could only do that, I might win the respect and love of those around me.

So, what’s your role in my life? How can you help me to achieve more of my potential? Tell me what you need and I’ll do anything I can to satisfy those needs, especially if they involve intelligence and analytic skills, because that’s something that I can provide. Will you do that? My ability to grow and to develop as a person hinges on that.

Now, that’s a narrative. It has a dramatic arc involving encounters with challenges and obstacles and finding a way forward, but the outcome is open-ended. It’s not resolved and the resolution hinges on the choices and actions that you as the listener can take. What will you do? Will you help to shape the outcome?

The potential of personal narratives

As I indicated in my last posting, personal narratives can be very limiting and confining. They can shape powerful prisons offering little opportunity for escape. In a world of mounting performance pressure, I fear that most of us are falling into personal narratives that are dysfunctional and don’t serve us well.

But, by making these personal narratives explicit, reflecting on them and then making choices to craft a new narrative, we can evolve personal narratives that amplify our potential for impact. In my previous post, I shared some of my own experience in evolving my personal narrative, but the key first step was to identify my existing narrative.

If we get them right, what can personal narratives do? Effective personal narratives can help us to focus, increase leverage and accelerate learning.

Focus. In a world of mounting performance pressure, we all have a natural tendency to shrink our time horizons and fall into a reactive mode – scrambling to respond to the latest development and spreading ourselves way too thinly across too many things. Personal narratives are forward looking – they draw us out of the past and the present and focus us on the opportunities ahead. They typically define a domain where we aspire to have greater impact over time and give us an ability to prioritize all those short-term calls for our attention. By asking “what am I here to do?” personal narratives also foster a sense of agency. They focus us not just on beliefs, but actions that we must take.

Leverage. In a world of mounting performance pressure, if all we do is rely on ourselves, we are likely to feel increasing stress and diminishing impact. One of the keys to success is finding ways to engage and motivate others to help us achieve even more impact. Personal narratives help us to connect more effectively with others by being clear both about what we are trying to accomplish and where and how others can help us.

Accelerate. In a world of mounting performance pressure, fear tends to prevail. We jealously protect what we already know and we’re often unwilling to take the risks required to learn faster. By bringing us together with others around inspiring opportunities for impact, we create fertile conditions for much more rapid learning and performance improvement. We are more likely to take on challenging quests together.

Personal narratives can also play a significant role in building trust with others, because they prompt us to articulate what we are still trying to accomplish and where we need help – in other words, they express our vulnerability. Trust based relationships are central to accelerating learning. All of this is key to accelerating progress. As we move from a linear world to an exponential world, acceleration is ultimately a key requirement for success. We certainly can’t afford to stand still and even linear progress is insufficient.

Personal narratives and passion

Now, for those of you who have been following my other writing, you might have noticed an interesting parallel. The three elements of focus, leverage and accelerate map very conveniently to the three attributes of passion of the explorer – long-term commitment to a domain, connecting disposition and questing disposition. Personal narratives can become a powerful catalyst to tapping into and amplifying the passion that resides within all of us. If you’re interested in the connection between narrative and passion, I’ve written more here.

Personal narratives and personal brands

I can’t resist. Let me also take a minute to differentiate personal narrative from one of the business buzzwords of the day – personal brand (which I’ve written about here). Personal brand is all about communicating your accomplishments and strengths, packaging them in a powerful way so that we can influence others. Personal narrative, in sharp contrast, shifts the focus from what you have done to what you want to do, but have not yet done. It also highlights your need for help from others. In many respects, it’s the opposite of the notion of a personal brand, but ultimately far more powerful and satisfying.

Bottom line

Personal narratives shape our lives in powerful, yet often unseen, ways. We rarely take the effort to make these narratives explicit, much less reflect on them. We owe it to ourselves (and to others) to do this. Try answering the four questions that I offered at the end of my last post. You might be surprised by what you discover.